2 The Spook Lights Affair Read online

  The grounds were lit by flickering torches that had been spaced at intervals along the carriageway and close to the large fountain in its center loop; others illuminated some of the larger statues. Servants must have filled the torches with kerosene for the party, for their flames flickered high—yellow, orange, blue, green. Their light created an eerie, glowing effect on the tendrils of mist that swirled among the trees, and allowed Sabina to keep Virginia in sight as she gave chase. The young ninny was now almost into the shadows cast by the copse of eucalyptus.

  Someone called out—one of the coach drivers, three of whom were standing together at the edge of the carriageway. Neither Virginia nor Sabina paid any attention to the call. The damp, uneven ground caused Sabina to slip and stumble, once to nearly lose her balance. She considered kicking off her—Callie’s—little formal slippers, but that would do more harm than good. Running in her stockings might make her footing more sure, but it would also send fresh chills and shivers through her body and allow wind-strewn eucalyptus pods and pine cones to bite into the soles of her feet. Barely in time, she saw and sidestepped a gopher hole. Even Adolph Sutro’s gardeners couldn’t defeat the ubiquitous California gophers.

  Ahead, Virginia cast another look over her shoulder just before vanishing among the eucalyptus, but she was out of sight only for as long as it took Sabina to reach the trees. Then she saw the girl on the cinder pathway, passing a fog-draped structure she recognized as the gazebo with peaked roof, ornate posts, and fancywork that Sutro had reportedly imported from France. Virginia’s destination now seemed clear: the broad, semicircular sea-view overlook that rose high behind the house, on which summer parties were held and which contained a water tower, observation platform, and enclosed photograph gallery. Where Lucas Whiffing waited? There didn’t seem to be any other reason why the girl would have taken such a circuitous route to the overlook, instead of going there directly across the rear terrace.

  The fog was thicker here, great moist coils of it that obscured the treetops and the upper edges of the parapet, and the distant pounding of the sea louder. The Potato Patch foghorn off Point Lobos bellowed mournfully. The hard cinders bit into Sabina’s chilled feet; the slippers and her stockings were no doubt damaged beyond repair. Callie’s gown, too, probably. She was so cold and wet now that a fear of pneumonia tugged at her mind. The fear made her furious. When she caught up with Miss St. Ives, she’d give the girl a tongue-lashing she’d never forget.

  Virginia had reached and started up the seaward stairs to the overlook. Sabina called out for her to stop and wait, but the shouted words had no effect; typically defiant, the girl didn’t seem to care that she was being pursued. She ran up the steps two at a time, a wraithlike figure in the sinuous vapor. By the time Sabina reached the foot of the stairs, her charge had vanished onto the flagstone floor above.

  Sabina made the climb as quickly as she was able, enduring little shoots of pain at every step. When she reached the top, she could see no sign of Virginia in the thick gray swirls. She paused with ears straining, heard the faint slap of the girl’s hurrying steps. Moments later those sounds ceased and others took their place—scramblings and scrapings that Sabina couldn’t identify.

  She moved ahead cautiously, swiping her hands through the fog in an effort to clear it so she could determine where Virginia had gone. After a few steps, a vague, ghostlike luminosity appeared ahead to her left—the deb’s white gown. The figure seemed poised a couple of feet above floor level, as if Virginia had climbed up onto the parapet at the overlook’s outer edge. But surely she wouldn’t have done anything that foolish—

  Yes, she would. And had. The fog curls parted just enough ahead to reveal the spectral shape of the girl some thirty yards distant, standing between two of the statues mounted on the parapet, facing toward the sea with her arms bent away from her body. She was alone atop the wall; if anyone else lurked nearby, he was hidden by the mist.

  What was she doing up there? The stones were slippery, dangerous in the wind and fog; beyond and beneath the wall was a mostly sheer drop of several hundred feet to the Great Highway.

  “Virginia!”

  The fog muffled Sabina’s cry, and she shouted again. To no avail. Virginia continued to stand, wavering slightly from side to side now, her gown making an audible fluttery sound—

  And then, to Sabina’s horrified amazement, the girl flung herself forward and disappeared.

  There was a shriek, shrill and long-drawn, then thudding, sliding sounds that carried above the voice of the wind—the sounds of a body tumbling down the cliffside.

  It took Sabina several seconds to stumble ahead to the parapet. Just as she reached it, her foot struck something lying on the flagstones. She ignored it for the moment, leaning over the wall between the two statues to peer downward. What she saw brought another shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. A strip of ground some eight feet wide stretched out beneath, the only section of it visible straight ahead where it sloped down to the cliff edge. That part was thinly covered with purple-flowered ice plant, mashed down where Virginia’s body had landed and slid through. Beyond the ice plant, the cliff fell away in a sheer vertical drop.

  Sabina drew back, and again her foot brushed against the object on the stones. She bent to pick it up, saw that it was the chatelaine handbag Virginia had carried. Clutching it, she glanced to her left. A winding set of steps chiseled into the bare rock led down to the highway below, she remembered, but the hovering grayness hid their exact location. They weren’t an option in any case. The stone steps would be slick and slippery and the descent treacherous; it would be folly to risk climbing down them in the darkness, even if there were a chance of finding the girl alive at the bottom. And she didn’t see how there could be. It was virtually impossible for anyone to have survived such a long fall.

  Why had the mad little fool done this to herself?

  Why?

  * * *

  Badly shaken, Sabina took the direct route back to the mansion, down the staircase at the opposite end of the overlook. Fog-laced shadows hid her from the guests behind the lighted ballroom windows as she hurried along the rim of the lower terrace. She made her way to the servant’s entrance, found the door there unlocked. Her sudden entrance and her disheveled appearance brought shocked stares from three members of the kitchen staff.

  “There’s been a terrible accident,” she told them. “One of you fetch Mr. Sutro. Quickly!”

  Her voice sounded as benumbed as her body felt, but the note of command in it was still strong enough to brook no argument. The male member of the staff nodded and hurried out. One of the two women guided Sabina over near the cookstove, where its pulsing heat soon warmed her blood and sent pins and needles tingling through her chilled flesh.

  She realized then that she still held Virginia’s handbag. Impulse led her to unsnap the clasp and reach inside. The usual feminine necessities, and a folded sheet of notepaper that Sabina drew out. She knew what it was even before she spread it open and read the lines written on it in a firm, girlish hand.

  I cannot bear to go on living in misery, facing a hopeless future. Everyone will be better off without me. Good-bye.

  Virginia

  So young, and so foolish!

  Portly and bewhiskered Adolph Sutro appeared just then, with a second, liveried servant in tow. Sabina had been introduced to the mayor briefly when she arrived and he remembered her, though he’d had no idea of her profession until she revealed it as part of her terse explanation of what had happened. As taken aback as he was by her words, and by those in the suicide note she handed him, he wasted no time with frivolous questions but took immediate charge.

  He sent the liveried servant to quietly summon David St. Ives and a doctor Sabina didn’t know named Bowers to the front terrace. “Tell them only that there is an emergency,” he said. “And bring along a brace of hand lanterns.” Then he instructed one of the kitchen women to fetch Sabina’s beaver coat, which she described, and the
other to find shoes to replace the ruined slippers. In less than five minutes she was bundled and reshod and almost warm again, only to have Sutro lead her back out into the cold darkness and around to the front where Virginia’s brother and Dr. Bowers waited.

  David St. Ives was grimly incredulous at the news of his sister’s plunge. As Sabina and the three men hurriedly settled into the coach that belonged to the St. Ives family, he said, “Suicide? Virginia? I don’t believe it.”

  “The note is in her handwriting?” Sabina said.

  “Yes, it’s hers. ‘Living in misery … hopeless future … everyone will be better off without me.’ None of that makes any sense. She had everything to live for.”

  “Obviously she didn’t think so. Young girls take life very seriously, Mr. St. Ives. And love as well.”

  “Love? She wasn’t in love with anyone.”

  “Your father believed she might be.”

  “That damned rascal Lucas Whiffing? Nonsense. She was upset at not being allowed to see him, but not despondent over it.”

  “Isn’t it possible she simply slipped and fell?” Mayor Sutro asked Sabina.

  “No, sir. She jumped from the parapet.”

  “You saw this clearly? Fog has a way of distorting what one observes from a distance.”

  “Clearly enough not to be mistaken.”

  “I still don’t believe it.” David St. Ives was glaring at her; she could feel as well as see the intensity of his stare in the lantern light as the coach rattled at a rapid pace along the carriageway. He was an arrogant, vain young man whom Sabina had disliked on their first meeting; his attitude now was even more overbearing and offensive, despite his obvious grief. “You were hired to watch over my sister, Mrs. Carpenter,” he said angrily. “How could you let something like this happen?”

  “I had no way of knowing what she was planning to do. I thought she was intent on meeting someone on the parapet. Lucas Whiffing, perhaps.”

  “Did you speak to her when you saw she was alone out there? Try to save her?”

  “There was no time to do either. I called her name, but either she didn’t hear me or ignored my shout—”

  “I still hold you responsible. You had words with her in the salon before she ran out. Everyone heard what was said.”

  “Her voice was raised, yes, but not mine. I said nothing to provoke her. Besides, she’d already made up her mind—the suicide note had already been written.”

  “Damn the suicide note! You could have saved her and you didn’t—that’s the inexcusable fact. You’ll pay dearly for your dereliction, I promise you that!”

  Mayor Sutro, sitting on the seat facing David St. Ives, leaned across to grip his knee. “That’s enough, young man. This is tragedy enough without you compounding it with threats.”

  St. Ives muttered something under his breath, then lapsed into a brooding silence.

  They were passing through the estate’s arched entrance now, onto Point Lobos Avenue. The coach driver whipped his brace of horses into a fast downhill run. The fog was so dense that the Cliff House and Sutro Baths, the mayor’s new and as yet unfinished gifts to the city, were invisible along the promontories below. And the intersection with the Great Highway materialized so abruptly that the driver was forced to brake sharply in order to make the turn.

  No lights showed along the highway’s sand-strewn expanse. There was little traffic in this part of the city at night, especially when the ocean fog was this thick. The coach clattered ahead, its side lanterns illuminating the bottom edges of the bare cliff wall. Abruptly, then, the driver braked again and the rig ground to a rocking halt. Sabina thought it must be because he had seen Virginia St. Ives’ broken remains in the roadway ahead. But when she alighted along with the three men, Sutro and St. Ives carrying the lanterns, she saw that this was not the case.

  What lay on the highway, in close to the cliff, was a rock the size of a small boulder that had evidently been dislodged during the fall. The girl’s body must be somewhere close by, hidden by the restless mist. But to Sabina’s surprise and consternation, this, too, turned out not to be the case.

  A long, careful search of the highway revealed no sign of Virginia, alive or dead.

  “It’s possible someone came along and found her,” Mayor Sutro said when the four of them stood with the driver in a bewildered group alongside the coach. “But my home is the nearest habitation and we would surely have encountered anyone entering the grounds. Nor did we pass another vehicle on the way down Point Lobos.”

  “Dickey’s Road House is less than a mile from here,” Sabina said.

  “Yes, that’s so. Unlikely, but … we’ll drive down there and see.”

  “If she wasn’t taken to Dickey’s,” David St. Ives said, “then she couldn’t have gone over the cliff. She must be caught on a tree or outcropping somewhere up above. Unconscious, or we’d have heard her cry for help.”

  Sabina would have liked to believe that, but she didn’t. “The strip of ground below the parapet was empty,” she said, “and marks in the ice plant are visible to the edge.”

  “Then she must have fallen all the way down,” Mayor Sutro said. “The cliff face is sheer below that strip.”

  Dr. Bowers spoke for the first time. “I’m afraid there’s no doubt of it, if this belongs to the girl. I found it near the dislodged rock.”

  What he was holding in his hand, outstretched into the glow of the mayor’s lantern, was a wisp of white cloth caught on a torn-off cypress limb. Sabina recognized it immediately: the distinctive butterfly scarf that had fluttered from the post-deb’s neck as she’d danced in the salon.

  “It’s Virginia’s,” her brother confirmed.

  The round trip to Dickey’s Road House, a popular breakfast stop for some of the more hardy and adventurous habitués of the Cocktail Route, took half an hour. And proved futile. No one there knew anything about Virginia St. Ives.

  On the solemn ride back to Sutro Heights, David broke a long silence by putting voice to what Sabina and the others were thinking. “If nobody came by and found her … my God, then what happened to her body?”

  3

  QUINCANNON

  The note, just delivered by runner to Quincannon’s Leavenworth Street flat, was printed in Ezra Bluefield’s distinctive back-slanted hand and typically brief and to the point:

  Bob Cantwell, 209 Spear Street #3. Information for sale Express matter. Tell him C. Riley sent you.

  E.B.

  A smile pleated Quincannon’s thick freebooter’s beard. Leave it to Bluefield to ferret out a lead no one else had yet discovered. Saving the life of the owner of the Scarlet Lady saloon, one of the less odious Barbary Coast deadfalls, and then cultivating the ex-miner’s friendship had been repaid many times over. Bluefield had his pudgy fingers on the pulse of the city’s criminal activities in and out of the Coast and there was little he didn’t know or couldn’t find out through his extensive contacts.

  The Express matter referred to a daring robbery by a lone masked man of the Wells, Fargo Express office one week ago, in which nearly $35,000 in greenbacks—a special company shipment that had just come in from the south by railroad—had been taken. The company’s detectives and the city’s bluecoats had failed to turn up a single lead, not surprisingly in the latter case given the general incompetence of the police.

  In such cases as this, when all else failed, Wells, Fargo had been known to pay a reward of ten percent to private agencies such as Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, for the return of the stolen cash and the arrest and conviction of the thief. Thirty-five hundred dollars was a considerable lure and Quincannon had undertaken his own investigation in pursuit of it. Thus far he had made as little headway as the other investigators, but if Bluefield’s tip panned out, he would lay claim to the reward and add another triumph to an already auspicious career.

  Bob Cantwell, eh? Quincannon, whose memory was both photographic and encyclopedic, knew the names of most of the
city’s snitches and information sellers, as well as those of scores of grifters, yeggs, confidence tricksters, and other criminals, but Cantwell’s was not among them. Yet the lad must be on the shady side if he possessed knowledge of the Wells, Fargo Express robbery. A gambler, professional or amateur? Charles Riley was the hardshell owner of the House of Chance, one of the Uptown Tenderloin sporting palaces.

  Before Bluefield’s runner had brought the sealed envelope, Quincannon had resigned himself to a lonely evening in his rooms, reading from Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes. Usually both solitude and poetry relaxed him; on this evening, however, neither helped ease a brooding restlessness. His mind kept straying to Sabina’s presence at one of Adolph Sutro’s lavish parties. Unescorted presence, blast it, in the midst of what was sure to be a gaggle of predatory males, accompanied and unaccompanied, who considered a comely widow fair game. Why the devil had she refused to allow him to join her tonight? True, she was on a job, a rather dull one with no real need of his company, but that had nothing to do with her refusal. “I’ll be busy, John, and you know you dislike formal gatherings among the social elite.” Social elite. Bah! Hobnobbing with highbrows may have been one of his least favorite activities, but where his partner was concerned, he was willing to put up with anything in order to forestall a potential assault on her favors.

  Well, he would just have to trust to Sabina’s avowed distinterest in the attentions of the male sex in general, and to his conviction that if anyone succeeded in breaking through her defenses, that someone would be John Quincannon. Now that he had a lead to the Wells, Fargo reward, he would be too busy himself for any more brooding. Money honestly earned and the thrill of the chase were even stronger motivations than his pursuit of Sabina, and $3,500 was the kind of prize that stirred his blood to a fine simmer.